She rewound, watched it again. It wasn’t one moving object, but three, or possibly four.
Raccoons.
Joyce laughed. Her first laugh in some time.
Time to turn her attention to the other camera, the one mounted near the library. One corner of the library building was in the upper-right quadrant of the screen. A road bisected the screen horizontally. The upper left was wooded area, and below the street, sidewalk. The camera itself was mounted atop a student residence-not Lorraine’ s-across from the library. The building where Lorraine lived was offscreen, to the right, maybe a hundred yards away.
The library was closed, of course, that late at night, and only about a fifth of the usual lights were on. Most of the road illumination came from streetlamps.
Joyce started at 11:20 p.m., and again fast-forwarded until something caught her eye.
A car entered the screen quickly from the left, stopped dead center. Joyce noted the time: 11:41 p.m. The driver’s door opened-the interior dome light flashed on-and a man jumped out carrying something square, and white.
A pizza box. It was a pizza delivery guy.
He ran toward the bottom of the screen, disappeared. Was he headed for the residence just out of view? Or could he have, once off closed-circuit, cut right and gone to Lorraine’s building?
Had she ordered a pizza? Duckworth had looked at her phone. If he’d seen a pizza delivery call, wouldn’t he have been all over that? But then again, she could have ordered it online, using her laptop. Or maybe she-
Hang on. The pizza guy was back, already. Only three minutes had passed. It was 11:44. He got behind the wheel, did a U-turn in the street, and tore off in the direction he’d come from.
Still, Joyce made a note.
11:45: nothing.
11:49: nothing.
11:55: nothing.
12:01: noth-Hello. What’s this?
A vehicle nosed into the screen from the left. Literally, nosed. A bumper and about six inches of hood. The vehicle nudged its way into the scene, and stopped.
There wasn’t enough vehicle showing to tell whether it was a car, an SUV, or maybe a pickup truck. The only thing it definitely did not look like was a van, where you would expect to see the hood sloping vertically up into a windshield.
Joyce hit pause, stared at the screen, brought her nose up to it, trying to tell what kind of car or truck it might be. But the image was grainy, the lighting inadequate.
She hit play, allowed the video to continue.
The headlights went out. For a few seconds, there was nothing. Then, a flash of light from the left. Two seconds maybe. On, and off.
The dome light, she thought. Someone getting out of the car, then closing the door.
And then, a person.
He-Joyce was guessing it was a he-came around the front of the vehicle quickly, mounted the curb, kept walking in that direction and out of the frame.
Gone.
Joyce paused the video, rewound, then went through the next fifteen seconds in slo-mo. Headlights off. Flash of light. Man coming around front of car.
Pause.
What could she actually tell about him? He was little more than a blurry, dark figure. No hat, but she couldn’t see his face well enough to know whether he was white, black, or brown. Anywhere from five-six to six feet, she guessed, which was not terribly helpful. That accounted for most men on the planet.
Pants, jacket. In other words, not naked.
“Shit,” Joyce said to no one in particular.
He was there, and then he was gone. A few seconds later, it was 12:02 a.m.
Joyce made more notes, then let the video continue. She resisted the urge to fast-forward. Her eyes stayed locked on the vehicle as the minutes ticked by.
At 12:07, a jogger.
Joyce was pretty sure it was the same jogger she’d seen from the other camera. He came in from the right side of the screen, ran to the left, and then he was gone. Instead of running on the sidewalk, he had chosen to run down the middle of the street.
She rewound, took a closer look at him. Same shorts, it looked like. And again, what looked like two strands of spaghetti running down from his ears.
Same jogger.
He’d run right past the parked vehicle. Within a few feet of it.
Joyce let the surveillance video play on.
It got to be 12:20 a.m., which was around the time Duckworth believed Lorraine Plummer had been killed.
Then it was 12:21.
12:22.
Joyce sat, eyes riveted.
He came out of nowhere at 12:34 a.m.
Coming from below the screen, running around the front of the car.
Two seconds of light as he opened the door, got behind the wheel, and closed the door.
Headlights on.
Drive forward, Joyce thought. Drive forward and let me get a better look at your ride.
The vehicle backed out of the frame.
“Fuck!” Joyce said, and banged a fist on the table hard enough to shake the monitor.
She kept the video rolling until 1:20, but there was nothing else to see.
Joyce leaned back in the computer chair, laced her fingers together at the back of her head, and again shouted, “Fuck!”
She’d really wanted to see what that son of a bitch was driving. But then she realized that even if she couldn’t see it, someone else had.
I have to find that jogger.
THIRTY-TWO
Duckworth
I’D been through the Olivia Fisher file several times in the last couple of weeks. I knew the basic facts, which were these: She was a beautiful young woman, twenty-four years old, black hair to her shoulders, round, bright eyes. Five-five, 132 pounds. She’d been born right here, at Promise Falls General Hospital, and done all her schooling in the town. She had never lived away from home, although that might very well have changed.
Olivia was engaged to Victor Rooney, also twenty-four at the time, another Promise Falls born-and-raised kid, who had gone to Thackeray for two years before dropping out. School wasn’t his thing. But he had, in the months prior to Olivia’s death, gotten a job with the town fire department. He had, over the years, held other odd jobs. Some of those had also been with the town, in other capacities.
One, I now remembered from a conversation I’d had not long ago with Olivia’s father, Walden, had been a summer position at the water treatment plant.
They were to be married in three months, at the end of August 2012. The hall had been booked, the invitations mailed. Olivia had just completed an environmental science degree at Thackeray, and was in line for a job at an oceanic institute in Boston. She was going to accept it, even though it would mean living away from Promise Falls, and her family, for the first time in her life. Victor was said to be sorry about leaving Promise Falls, but had planned to apply for a firefighting job anywhere in the Boston area.
None of that happened.
On Friday, May 25, at nine twenty p.m., Olivia Fisher was in Promise Falls Park, not far from the foot of the waterfall, waiting to meet her fiancé. He’d worked an afternoon shift with the fire department and was planning to grab a couple of drinks with his buddies after, at Knight’s. He planned to leave there at nine and walk over to the park-it was only a few blocks from the bar, and he knew he probably wouldn’t be in any shape to drive-but he lost track of time.
Had he left when he’d planned to, it was possible Olivia would not have been grabbed from behind. It was possible a knife would not have penetrated the left side of her abdomen. It was possible that knife would not then have sliced across Olivia to roughly the same position on the other side of her torso.
With that distinctive, signature cut. Curving down slightly in the middle, a crude smile.
The attack most likely took little more than a few seconds. But in that time, Olivia Fisher managed to scream. From all accounts, at least twice.